Newmark Peter: The Process of Translating (Report, pages 100-116)

Introduction

According to Newmark translating procedure is operational. It begins with choosing a method of approach. Secondly, translate with the four levels in mind: (1) the source language text level: the level of language. (2) The referential level: the level of objects and events. (3) The cohesive level: this level is more general and grammatical. (4) The level of naturalness: of common language appropriate to the writer or the speaker in a certain situation. Finally, there is a revision procedure, which may be focused or staggered according to the situation or context.

The Relation of Translating To Translation Theory

It derives from a translation theory framework which proposes that when the main purpose of the text is to convey information and convince to the reader, a method of translating must be natural if, on the other hand, the text is an expression of the peculiar innovate and authoritative style of an author (whether it be a lyric, a prime minister’s speech or a legal document), the translator’s own version has to reflect any deviation from a natural style. Naturalness is both grammatical and lexical. The level of naturalness binds translation theory to translating theory to practice. The theory of translating is based, via the level of naturalness, on a theory of translation.

The Approach

As translators we must comprehend something and have it very clear: in translation nothing is purely objective or subjective, there are no cast-iron rules, everything is more or less and there is no absolutes.

There are two approaches to translating:

1. You start translating sentences by sentences, for say the first paragraph or chapter to get the sense of the text, the feeling tone, and then you deliberately sit back, review the position, and read the rest of the source language text.

2. You read the whole text two or three times, and find the intention, register, tone, mark the difficult words and passages and start translating only when you have taken your bearings.

You may think the first method more suitable for a literary and the second for a technical or an institutional text. The danger of the first method is that it may leave you with too much revision to do on the early part and is therefore time wasting. The second method (usually preferable) can be mechanical; a translational text analysis is useful as a point of reference but it hold not inhibit the free play of your intuition. Alternatively, you may prefer the first approach for a relatively easy text, the second for a difficult one.

The Textual Level

The base level when you translate is the text. This is the level of the literal translation of the source language into the target language, the level of the translationese you have to eliminate, but it also acts as a corrective or paraphrase and a parer-down of synonyms. Basically you transpose the source language grammar (clauses and groups) into their ‘ready’ target language equivalents and you translate the lexical units into the sense that appears immediately appropriate in the context of the sentence.

The Referential Level

At this level you have to make up your mind and, summarily and continuously ask yourself, what is it about? What is an aid of? What the writer‘s peculiar slant on it is?

Always, you have to be able to summarize in crude lay terms, to simplify at the risk of over-simplification, to pierce the jargon, to penetrate the fog of words. Thus your translation is some hint of a compromise between the text and the facts. You have to supplement the linguistic level, the text level with the referential level, the factual level with the necessary additional information (no more) from this level of reality, the facts of the matter.

The referential level where you mentally sort out the text is built up of, based on, the clarification of all linguistic difficulties, and where appropriate, supplementary information from the ‘encyclopedia’ – my symbol for any work of reference or textbook. You build up the referential picture in your mind when you translate the source language into the target language text, and, being a professional, you are responsible for the truth of this picture.

The Cohesive Level

The cohesive level follows both the structure and the moods of the text: the structure through the connective words (conjunctions, enumerations, reiterations, definite article, general words, referential synonyms, punctuation marks) linking the sentences usually proceeding from known information (theme) to new information (rheme). Thus the structure follows the train of thoughts, it involves that there is a sequence of time, space and logic in the text. The second factor in the cohesive level is the mood, again, this can be shown as a dialectical factor moving between positive and negative, emotive and neutral.

This level attempts to follow thought through the connectives and feeling tone, and the emotion through value-laden or value-free expressions, is, admittedly, only tentative, but it may determinate the difference between a humdrum or misleading translation and a good tone. This cohesive level is a regulator, it secures coherence, it adjusts emphasis.

The Level of Naturalness

Normally, you can only reach this level by temporarily disengaging yourself from the source language text, by reading your own translation as though no original existed. Thus in translating any type of text you have to sense naturalness, usually for the purpose of reproducing, sometimes for the purpose of deviating from naturalness.

You have to bear in mind that the level of naturalness of natural usage is grammatical as well as lexical (i.e. the most frequent syntactic structures, idioms and words that are likely to be appropriate found in that kind of context), and, through appropriate sentence connectives, may extend to the entire text.

Naturalness is easily defined as, not so easy to be concrete about. Natural usage comprises a variety of idioms or styles or registers determined primarily by the setting of the text i.e. where it is typically published or found, secondarily by the author, topic and readership, all of whom are usually dependent of the setting. Natural usage, then, must be distinguished from ‘ordinary language’.

You have to pay special attention to:

•  Word order;

• Common structures;

• Cognate words;

• The appropriateness of gerunds, infinitives, verb-nouns;

• Lexis;

• Other ‘obvious’ areas of interference.

Naturalness is not something that you wait to acquire by instinct. You work towards it by small progressive stages, working from the most common to the less common features, like anything else rationally, even if you never quite attain it. There is no universal naturalness. Naturalness depends on the relationship between the writer, the readership and the topic or situation. What is natural in one situation may be unnatural in another, but everyone has a natural, ‘neutral’ language where spoken and informal written language more or less coincide.

Combining the Four Levels

To sum up the process of translating, Newmark suggests to keep in parallel the four levels, the textual, the referential, the cohesive, the natural; they are distinct from but frequently impinge on and may be in the conflict with each other. Your first and last level is the text; then you have to continually bear in mind the level of reality (which may be simulated i.e. imagined, as well as real), but you let it filter into the text only when this is necessary to complete or secure the readership’s understanding of the text, and then normally only within informative and vocative texts. As regards the level of naturalness, you translate informative and vocative texts on his this level irrespective of the naturalness of the original, bearing in mind that naturalness is, say, formal texts is quite different from naturalness in colloquial texts. For the expressive and authoritative texts, however, you keep to a linguistically or stylistically innovate, you should aim at a corresponding degree of innovation, representing the degree of deviation from naturalness, in your translation ironically even when translating this innovative texts, their natural level remains as a point of reference.

The Unit of Translating

Usually we translate sentence by sentence, running the risk of not paying enough attention to the sentence-joins. If the translation of a sentence has no problems it is based firmly on literal translation, plus virtually automatic and spontaneous transpositions and shifts, changes in word order, etc.

The problem comes when you wonder how to make sense of a difficult sentence. Usually you only have trouble with grammar in a long complicated sentence, often weighed down by a series of word-groups depending on the verb-nouns.

The Translation of Lexis

The chief difficulties in translating are lexical, not grammatical. Difficulties with words are of two kinds: (a) you do not understand them; (b) you find them hard to translate. If you cannot translate a word it may be because all its possible meanings are not known to you, or because its meaning is determined by its unusual collocation or a reference elsewhere in the text. We have to bear in mind that many common nouns have four types of meaning:

• Physical or material.

• Figurative.

• Technical.

• Colloquial

In addition, other possible solutions to the ‘word problem’ are that the word may have an archaic or a regional sense (consult appropriate dictionaries) may be used ironically, or in a sense peculiar or private to the writer (idiolect) or it may be misprinted. But there is one thing we must assure: the writer must have known what he wanted to say : he would never have written a drop of nonsense in the middle of a sea of sense, and somehow you have to find that sense, by any kind of lateral thinking misprint, miscopying, (anatomy for autonomy), author’s linguistic or technical ignorance.

The Translation of Proper Names

You have to look up all paper names you do not know. You should not lose sight of the linguistic problems of the texts. You must let your mind play over the various type of reference, or your own memories. Newmark doesn’t denies neurolinguistic, psychological process in translation. Newmark points that you cannot schematize proper names, they are unconscious, part of the imagination.

We shall remember that while English keeps the first names of foreign persons unchanged, French and Italian sometimes arbitrarily translate them, even if they are names of living people.

Revision

During the final revision stage of translating, you constantly try to pare down your version in the interest of elegance and force, at the same time allowing some redundancy to facilitate reading and ensuring that no substantial sense component is lost.

Translators must always try to be accurate. They have no license to change words that have plain one-to-one translations just because you think they sound better than the original. The fact that you are subjected as a translator to so many forces and tensions is no excuse for plain inaccuracy. Revision is also a technique that you acquire by practicing.

Conclusion

It is one of the numerous paradoxes of translation that a vast number of text, far from being impossible as many linguists and men of letter -not usually in agreement- still believe, are in fact easy, tedious and suitable for machine-aided translation, and even machine translation but still essential and vital, whilst other texts may be considered as material for scholars, a researcher and an artist.

Translation is most clearly art, when a poem, is sensitively translated into a poem. But any deft ‘translation’ of an imaginative piece of writing is artistic, when it conveys the meaning through a happy balance or resolution of some of the tensions in the process, when it reaches the four levels of translation.

References:

Newmark, Peter. (2003). A textbook of translation. Essex: Longman. P19-38.